Industry use cases of Openshift
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In this article, We are going to Research for industry use cases of Openshift
What is OpenShift?
OpenShift is a cloud development Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosted by Red Hat. It’s an open-source, cloud-based, user-friendly platform used to create, test, and run applications, and finally deploy them on the cloud.
OpenShift can manage applications written in different languages, such as Ruby, Node.js, Java, Perl, and Python. One of the key features of OpenShift is extensible, which helps the users support the application written in other languages.
OpenShift helps organizations move their traditional application infrastructure and platform from physical, virtual mediums to the cloud.
OpenShift supports a huge variety of applications, quickly developed and deployed on the OpenShift cloud platform. OpenShift supports three kinds of platforms for developers and users.
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
In this format, the service provider provides hardware-level virtual machines with some pre-defined virtual hardware configuration. There are multiple competitors in this space, starting from Rackspace, AWS Google Cloud, Rackspace, and many more.
The main drawback of having IaaS after a lengthy setup and investment procedure is that one is still responsible for installing and maintaining the operating system and server packages, managing the network of infrastructure, and taking care of the basic system administration.
2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
With SaaS, one has the least worry about the underlying infrastructure. It is as simple as plug and play, wherein the user has to sign up for the services and start using it.
The main drawback of this setup is that one can only perform a minimal amount of customization, which the service provider allows.
Gmail is the most common example of SaaS, where the user needs to login and start using it. The user can also make some minor modifications to his account. However, it is not very useful from the developer’s point of view.
3. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
It can be considered as a middle layer between SaaS and IaaS. PaaS evaluation’s primary target is for developers in which the development environment can be spin up with a few commands.
These environments are designed in such a way that they can satisfy all the development needs, right from having a web application server with a database.
The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor the container resources, container health, manage users, work with operators, etc.
History
- OpenShift originally came from Red Hat’s acquisition of Makara. It is a company with a proprietary PasSsolution based on Linux containers.
- OpenShift was announced in May 2011. It was proprietary technology and did not become open-source until May of 2012. Up until v3, the container technology and container orchestration technology used custom-developed technologies.
- This changed in v3 with Docker’s adoption as the container technology, and Kubernetes as the container orchestration technology.
- The v4 product has many other architectural changes, such as a prominent one being a shift to using CRI-O as the container runtime (and Podman for interacting with pods and containers), and Buildah as the container build tool, thus breaking the complete dependency on Docker.
Architecture
OpenShift is a layered system wherein each layer is tightly bound with the other layer using Kubernetes and Docker cluster. The architecture of OpenShift is designed to support and manage Docker containers, which are hosted on top of all the layers using Kubernetes.
Unlike the earlier version of OpenShift V2, the new version of OpenShift V3 supports containerized infrastructure. In this model, Docker helps create lightweight Linux-based containers, and Kubernetes supports the task of orchestrating and managing containers on multiple hosts.
The main difference between OpenShift and Kubernetes is the concept of build-related artifacts.
In OpenShift, such artifacts are considered first-class Kubernetes resources upon which standard Kubernetes operations can apply. OpenShift’s client program, known as oc, offers a superset of the standard capabilities bundled in the mainline kubectl client program of Kubernetes. Using this client, one can directly interact with the build-related resources using sub-commands.
In addition to this, an OpenShift-native pod build technology called Source-to-Image (S2I) is available out of the box.
Why Use OpenShift?
OpenShift provides a common platform for enterprise units to host their applications on the cloud without worrying about the underlying operating system. This makes it very easy to use, develop, and deploy applications on the cloud.
One of the key features is that it provides managed hardware and network resources for development and testing. With OpenShift, PaaS developer has the freedom to design their required environment with specifications.
OpenShift provides a different kind of service level agreement when it comes to service plans.
- Free: This plan is limited to three years with 1GB space for each.
- Bronze: This plan includes 3 years and expands up to 16 years with 1GB space per year.
- Silver: This is a 16-year plan of bronze; however, it has a storage capacity of 6GB with no additional cost.
Other than the above features, OpenShift also offers an on-premises version known as OpenShift Enterprise.
In OpenShift, developers have the leverage to design scalable and non-scalable applications, and these designs are implemented using HAproxy servers.
OpenShift Types
OpenShift came into existence from its base named OpenShift V2, mainly based on gear and cartridges. Each component has its specifications starting from machine creation until application deployment, right from building to deploying it.
- Cartridges: They were the focal point of building a new application starting from the type of application the environment requires to run them and all the dependencies satisfied in this section.
- Gear: It can be defined as the bare metal machine or server with individual specifications regarding the resources, memory, and CPU. They were considered as a fundamental unit for running an application.
- Application: These refer to the application or any integration application that will get deployed and run on the OpenShift environment.
We will discuss on different formats and offerings of OpenShift. In the earlier days, OpenShift had three major versions.
- OpenShift Origin: This was the community addition or open-source version of OpenShift. It was also known as an upstream project for the other two versions.
- OpenShift Online: It is a pubic PaaS as a service hosted on AWS.
- OpenShift Enterprise: It is the hardened version of OpenShift with ISV and vendor licenses.
1. OpenShift Online
OpenShift Online offers the OpenShift community to quickly build, deploys, and scale containerized applications on the public cloud.
It is Red Hat’s public cloud application development and hosting platform, which enables automated provisioning, management and scaling of application, which helps the developer focus on writing application logic.
2. OpenShift Container Platform
OpenShift container platform is an enterprise platform which helps multiple teams such as development and IT operations team to build and deploy containerized infrastructure. All the containers built-in OpenShift uses a very reliable Docker containerization technology, which can be deployed on any data center of publically hosted cloud platforms.
OpenShift container platform was formally known as OpenShift Enterprises. It is a Red Hat on-premise private platform as service, built on the core concept of application containers powered by Docker, where Kubernetes manage orchestration and administration.
OpenShift brings Docker and Kubernetes together to the enterprise level. It is container platform software for enterprise units to deploy and manage applicants in their choice infrastructure. OpenShift container platform is available in two package levels.
- OpenShift Container Local: This is for those developers who wish to deploy and test applications on the local machine. This package is mainly used by development teams for developing and testing applications.
- OpenShift Container Lab: This is designed for extended evaluation of application from development until deployment to the pre-prod environment.
3. OpenShift Dedicated
This is another offering added to the portfolio of OpenShift, wherein there is a customer choice of hosting a containerized platform on any of the public clouds of their choice. It gives the end-user a true sense of multi-cloud offering, where they can use OpenShift on any cloud which satisfies their needs.
This is one of the newest offerings of Red Hat, where the end-user can use OpenShift to build, test, deploy and run their application on OpenShift, which is hosted on the cloud.
Features of OpenShift Dedicated
OpenShift dedicated offers customized solution application platform on the public cloud, inherited from OpenShift 3 technology.
- Extensible and Open: This is built on Docker’s open concept and deployed on the cloud because it can expand itself as and when required.
- Portability: As it is built using Docker, the applications running on Docker can easily be shipped from one place to the other, where Docker is supported.
- Orchestration: With OpenShift 3, one of the key features of container orchestration and cluster management is supported using Kubernetes, which came into an offering with OpenShift version 3.
- Automation: This version of OpenShift is enabled with source code management, build automation, and deployment automation, making it very popular in the market as a Platform as a Service provider.
4. OKD
Origin Community Distribution or OKD is the upstream community project used in OpenShift Online, OpenShift Dedicated, and OpenShift Container Platform. Built around a core of Docker container packaging and Kubernetes container cluster management, Origin is augmented by application lifecycle management functionality and DevOps tooling.
Origin provides an open-source application container platform. All source code for the Origin project is available under the Apache License on GitHub.
Ford Motor Company adopts Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift
Ford Motor Company seeks to provide mobility solutions at accessible prices to its customers, including dealerships and parts distributors who sell to a variety of retail and commercial consumers. To speed delivery and simplify maintenance, the company sought to create a container-based application platform to modernize its legacy stateful applications and optimize its hardware use. With this platform, based on Red Hat OpenShift and supported by Red Hat and Sysdig technology, Ford has improved developer productivity, enhanced its security and compliance approach, and optimized its hardware use to improve operating costs. Now, the company can focus on exploring new ways to innovate, from big data to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“Kubernetes and OpenShift
have really forced us to
think differently about our
problems, because we
can’t solve new business
challenges with traditional
approaches... We’re now well-
situated for future success.”Satish Puranam
Technical Specialist,
Cloud Platforms,
Ford Motor Company
CHALLENGE
Achieve innovation for faster delivery
Ford’s business units host a robust, engaged development community. But collaboration between hundreds of thousands of employees and across thousands of internal applications and sites created complexity that Ford’s traditional IT environment and development approaches could not accommodate. Even with hypervisors and virtual machines, the company struggled with inefficient resources use and high staffing costs. Ford wanted a new environment to help it use its resources more efficiently.
SOLUTION
Use containers with added security to automate
Ford sought to use container technology, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation in its datacenters to modernize its legacy, stateful applications and optimize its hardware use. After considering several Kubernetes solutions, Ford migrated to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and adopted Red Hat Quay. Ford also partnered with Sysdig technology, a Kubernetes security solution certified by Red Hat, to add extra visibility and protection for development and production.
Benefits
- Improved productivity with standardized development environment and self-service provisioning
- Enhanced security with enterprise technology from Red Hat and continuous monitoring provided by Sysdig
- Significantly reduced hardware costs by running OpenShift on bare metal
“With OpenShift, we
have a common
framework that can be
reused for deploying
an application or
service, because every
major cloud provider
has Kubernetes
compatibility. We can
now deliver features
in a more secure,
reliable manner.”Jason Presnell
CaaS Product Service Owner,
Ford Motor Company
Automotive innovation requires modern platform to enhance legacy applications
Ford Motor Company is a leader in creating reliable, technologically advanced vehicles worldwide. Its mission is to provide mobility solutions at accessible prices to its customers, including dealerships and parts distributors who sell to a variety of retail and commercial consumers.
”We’re a well-known brand. Everybody knows the Ford oval,” said Jason Presnell, CaaS [Containers-as-a-Service] Product Service Owner, at Ford Motor Company. “Our mission in becoming a mobility company is to not only find new ways to help people get from place to place, but also to get them the information and tools they need to support their travel, like mobile apps that let you start or unlock your car. We need to support and deliver these capabilities at a global scale.”
Each of Ford’s business units hosts a robust, engaged development community that is focused on building products and services that take advantage of the latest technological innovations, from machine learning for crash analysis and autonomous driving to high-performance computing (HPC) for prototype creation and testing. But this engagement across hundreds of thousands of employees and thousands of internal applications and sites created complexity that Ford’s traditional IT environment and development approaches could not accommodate. Even with hypervisors and virtual machines, the company struggled with inefficient resource use and high staffing costs to maintain this environment.
“We needed faster delivery for our stateful applications,” said Satish Puranam, Technical Specialist, Cloud Platforms, at Ford Motor Company. “Pivotal Cloud Foundry worked fine for newer, stateless applications that were built for portability, but we’re a hundred-year-old company with a lot of stateful, data-heavy, legacy applications. For things like inventory systems, dealer-facing applications, and CI/CD [continuous integration and delivery] that needed data persistence, getting the right infrastructure could take as long as 6 months.”
Ford sought to use Kubernetes container technology, application programming interfaces (APIs), and automation within its datacenters to give its legacy stateful applications the benefits of public cloud: faster delivery, easier maintenance, and automated scalability. Consolidating its hardware and software environments with container orchestration would also help the company use its resources more effectively.
”Containers are an extremely portable way to deliver an application, because you can build in all the dependencies and libraries that allow anyone to run that container and get the same performance in any environment,” said Presnell. “But we wanted to focus on the value we could deliver, not maintaining the container platform. We needed container orchestration that would provide not only application delivery, but also service capabilities to maintain that environment.”
New container-based application platform uses enterprise and community open source technology
After running tests and proofs of concept (POCs) of container technology, Ford began looking for an enterprise partner offering commercially supported open source solutions to help run containers in production and support innovative experimentation.
“We have several open source technologies in our IT environment and products. We want to move toward being able to use and contribute to open source more — to help somebody else in the community take what we’ve done and improve on it,” said Presnell. “But we needed a container platform that had an enterprise offering, one that was well-known in the industry and was well-engineered.”
Past experience with Kubernetes led Ford to adopt CoreOS Tectonic. When CoreOS was acquired by Red Hat, Ford migrated to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a solution that enhanced the strengths of CoreOS’s offering with new automation and security capabilities. Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, OpenShift Container Platform offers a scalable, centralized Kubernetes application platform to help teams quickly and more reliably develop, deploy, and manage container applications across cloud infrastructure.
The company also implemented Red Hat Quay to create a centralized container registry to host and secure all of its container images while offering protected, API-based access to partners and other third parties.
“Red Hat is one of the top engineering-focused Linux companies in the world and produces one of the most significant Linux distributions,” said Presnell. “They are the second biggest contributor to the Kubernetes community. Red Hat is really focused on providing enterprise-quality service alongside engineering excellence.”
Ford has also adopted several open source technologies that Red Hat contributes to, from Open Data Hub — a data and artificial intelligence (AI) platform for hybrid cloud — to Dex, an OpenID-based identity authentication service.
During migration, Ford worked closely with Red Hat Consulting to create an environment that supports more than 100 back-end and dealer-facing stateful applications, including databases and messaging systems, inventory systems, and API managers. After launching OpenShift in production, Ford also adopted Sysdig Secure and Sysdig Monitor, a Kubernetes security solution certified by Red Hat, to add extra visibility and protection for its development and production OpenShift environments.
For its success using OpenShift for modern automotive development and using digital technology to serve customers, Ford was recognized with a 2020 Red Hat Innovation Award.
Performance and security improvements help Ford deliver services and work with partners more efficiently
Significantly increased developer productivity
Using OpenShift Container Platform, Ford has accelerated time to market by centralizing and standardizing its application development environment and compliance analysis for a consistent multicloud experience. For example, OpenShift’s automation capabilities help Ford deploy new clusters more rapidly.
These improvements are enhanced by the company’s shift from a traditional, waterfall approach to iterative DevOps processes and a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflow.
Now, some of the same processes for stateful workloads take minutes instead of months, and developers no longer need to focus on underlying infrastructure with self-service provisioning. These improvements extend to Ford’s IT hosting, where the company has seen a significant productivity improvement for CaaS support. Dealers and plant operators gain access to new features, fixes, and updates faster through Ford’s multitenant OpenShift environment.
“With OpenShift, we have a common framework that can be reused for deploying applications or services within our datacenter or to any major cloud provider,” said Presnell. “We can now deliver features in a more secure, reliable manner.”
Enhanced security and compliance with enterprise container and monitoring technology
Companies in the automotive industry must comply with various security standards and regulations, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and personal data protection standards. When creating its new container platform, Ford sought to balance providing access to partners and developers with ensuring vulnerabilities and updates were addressed and working toward future adoption of a DevSecOps approach.
“In a container environment, moving applications and code continuously, security needs to be automated and built in from when a container is created,” said Payal Chakravarty, Vice President, Products, Sysdig. “Sysdig provides real-time vulnerability management in CI/CD pipelines. Security checks are in place to analyze code and identify issues before production.”
To support this approach, Ford standardized on Red Hat container images and registries using Red Hat Quay. OpenShift provides a unified management interface across Ford’s entire infrastructure, as well as built-in Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) capabilities.
Sysdig Secure and Sysdig Monitor help Ford enhance this protection with improved, data-based insight into container infrastructure to run OpenShift in a compliant way. “Sysdig can tell us about a container’s network activity, can help us protect multiple containers running on a single host, and provide continuous monitoring and alerts,” said Puranam.
Significantly reduced hardware costs
Shifting to a container-based approach requires less initial hardware investment — and ongoing savings as Ford continues to modernize and migrate its legacy applications. The company has improved the efficiency of its hardware footprint by running OpenShift on bare metal and using its existing hardware more effectively.
“We were able to initially run OpenShift on a fleet of hardware that had literally been pulled out of our datacenter to be scrapped. We put that hardware back and are successfully running production OpenShift on it today,” said Puranam.
By establishing an approach for controlling costs and increasing profit margins, Ford can reallocate resources to higher-value projects to address new business opportunities faster.
Successful adoption of OpenShift and DevOps creates foundation for new opportunities to innovate
Ford is already experiencing significant growth in demand for its OpenShift-based applications and services. It aims to achieve migration of most of its on-premise, legacy deployments within the next few years.
The company is also looking for ways to use its container platform environment to address opportunities like big data, mobility, machine learning, and AI to continue delivering high-quality, timely services to its customers worldwide.
“Kubernetes and OpenShift have really forced us to think differently about our problems, because we can’t solve new business challenges with traditional approaches. Innovation and constantly exploring and questioning are the only way we can move forward,” said Puranam. “It’s a journey, but one that we have a good start on. Thanks to having the right set of partners, with both Red Hat and Sysdig, we’re well-situated for future success.”
BUSINESS OUTCOME
Increase productivity while reducing costs
With the new multitenant Red Hat OpenShift environment, dealers and plant operators gain access to new features, fixes, and updates faster. Now, many processes for stateful workloads take less time, and the company has seen a productivity improvement for Containers-as-a-Service support. Shifting to a container-based approach requires less initial hardware investment — and ongoing savings as Ford continues to modernize and migrate its legacy applications.
"We were able to initially run OpenShift on a fleet of hardware that had literally been pulled out of our datacenter to be scrapped. We put that hardware back and are successfully running production OpenShift on it today."Jason Presnell
CaaS Product Service Owner, Ford Motor Company
About Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan. The company designs, manufactures, markets and services a full line of Ford cars, trucks, SUVs, electrified vehicles and Lincoln luxury vehicles, provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company and is pursuing leadership positions in electrification; mobility solutions, including self-driving services; and connected services. Ford employs approximately 190,000 people worldwide. For more information regarding Ford, its products, and Ford Motor Credit Company, visit www.corporate.ford.com.
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